


The Inventions of the Wheel

by AstroGirl



Category: One Hour One Life
Genre: Family, Gen, Reincarnation, Survival
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-27
Updated: 2018-07-27
Packaged: 2019-06-16 21:00:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15445749
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AstroGirl/pseuds/AstroGirl
Summary: Life, death, rebirth, and the desire to accomplish... something.





	The Inventions of the Wheel

**Author's Note:**

> This was written for Gen Prompt Bingo, for the prompt "the pursuit of happiness." It seemed like a good excuse to write something inspired by the video game I'm currently a little bit obsessed with: [One Hour, One Life](http://onehouronelife.com/). It's a game of survival, crafting, and civilization building -- and a very challenging one, at that. But it's also an odd little social experiment of a game, and one that has made me think some strangely philosophical thoughts.
> 
> I'm not sure how much in the way of philosophical thought is to be found in this story, but I like to think it does capture some of my own experience of what it's like to play the game.
> 
> Note: I put a "major character death" warning just to be strictly accurate, but, honestly, dying repeatedly is simply part of the game. You only ever live an hour at most, after all. So there's really not much there to warn for. This does contain child neglect and abandonment, as well, I suppose, though all "children" in the game are really just players, most of whom are presumably not actually babies in real life.

I am born, alone in the wilderness, from nothing.

The world stretches out around me, green and lush, full of infinite possibility. I will make my mark upon this landscape, I think. I will build something from nothing. I will establish a town, and populate it with beautiful children. I will found a dynasty and forge a destiny. I will not be forgotten.

I do not see the snake behind the tree. I die without descendants, but my dreams live on.

**

I am born to a struggling mother. She is trying to raise children and crops, but neither is going well. The soil is untilled, unplanted. The bones of my siblings lie where they have fallen. Their corpses are in the way, but she has been too busy to move them.

She is trying to make a fire to light a kiln to make a bowl to carry the all-important water. But she is disorganized, and wood is scarce. She has to keep stopping in the middle to find food, or to search for branches to use as kindling.

I find a warm spot and try to distract her as little as possible. Somehow, she manages to feed me until I am old enough to fend for myself.

I try to help. I want her to succeed. I want to make her proud. I want to see us through these rough times, to save us, to build a future.

But the berry bushes are empty, the wild burdock roots all dug up and eaten. I run for a place where I think there may be more, but I am too young. I starve too quickly.

Perhaps she will have more children, I think. Perhaps the crops will come in at last, and they will survive.

But it is not to be. Moments later, she joins me in the afterlife. I cannot talk to her there, but I can see the echo of her last words. She has not spoken since she gave me my name. She has not had the time.

**

I am born in a large, thriving town. My mother names me, feeds me, seems to want me.

Then she wanders away and does not come back. No one else pays attention to my cries. I die with barely a glimpse of the world I was meant to inherit.

**

I am born in a large, thriving town. My mother feeds me, clothes me, tells me she loves me. My older siblings tell her I am cute. My grandmother offers me words of wisdom before she dies.

I help out in small ways. I farm. I cook. I raise children: two sons who will not carry on my family line, but they are good young men and I am proud of them.

I live my life, surrounded by family and friends. I forge a bond with my second cousin, as we joke about feeding babies and feeding sheep. I teach a new soul how to fertilize the berries.

I die old and loved. My descendants say they will bury me with honor.

I have not left much of a mark on the landscape. This town may be no different because I was here. But, for a moment, I am content.

**

I am born alone in the wilderness, from nothing.

This time I live. I find a beautiful place, abundant with food, flowing with water. I can imagine this place becoming a town like the one I just left. The smithy will be here, the berry farm there. Once these trees are cleared, the wide-open, well-watered space will be a wonderful place to grow vegetables and wheat.

I work quickly. I make the tools, I make the kiln, I fire the pottery and gather the seeds and plant the crops. I raise children, or try to. It is difficult to do both at the same time. My first daughter neglects to cry for food when she is hungry, and dies. My second does not want to be here, to experience the struggle of starting afresh, and runs off to die, hoping to reincarnate somewhere more civilized. My first son tries to help, but he is an inexperienced soul, and he will not stay still long enough for me to teach him. He forgets to eat, and starves. My second son is a good worker, and smart, but at fourteen he stumbles into the path of a wild boar and does not survive.

My final daughter, the child of my advancing age, is my blessing. Moments after she arrives, I am too old to nurse her, so I feed her with berries. I do not name her "Hope" – I have borne that name too often, and too often failed to live up to it – but she is my hope, nonetheless. She is the one I have been waiting for. She carries on the farm. I bring her iron, and she forges tools. She is my future.

I live to see an infant granddaughter before I die, and I pass from this life feeling optimistic. I do not see my daughter arrive in the afterlife, not for a long time. She is a survivor, my girl, and a builder. My dream of a town and a lineage may be coming true. This may be what I have strived for.

But my first granddaughter, I see, died very young. And my second, my daughter's only other child, bears only sons. One of them lives his full allotted span and dies alone. The echo of his lonely last words is achingly sad.

It is just possible that someone, someday, will stumble upon this place I made. That my beautiful nascent town will yet be allowed to flourish and grow. More likely, it will pass again into the wilderness, and no one but us will ever know we were there. And, in the endless parade of life after life, even we will soon forget.

**

I am born in a massive city. There seems little to do here, and the people are unfriendly. I try to make myself useful, but nothing goes well. The tool I need is missing, or someone else leaps in to do the thing I was preparing to do. 

Maybe it is just as well, I think, that my own town has remained a dream, if it might have become this, in time.

**

I am born in a city. There is much to do. There are wells to be dug. There is baking, hunting, farming. There are too few people for everything that needs to be done, but we are happy to work, happy to help each other, and new babies are being born to carry on when we are gone.

But there is one person who is not working, not helping, not raising children. There is one person forging a knife, and his intent is not to kill the snakes that slither on the edge of town or to butcher sheep for mutton. 

This happens, all too often. There are always those who practice violence. Some will kill those they do not think contribute enough, or those who break some unwritten rule. Some will kill another for his clothing, or a baby because it is one more mouth to feed.

Or they will kill because they delight in it, because they wish nothing buy to destroy what others have built. It makes them feel powerful, I think. Makes them feel superior in the only way they can.

This one targets babies and fertile women. He is intent not simply on murder, but on genocide. He will wipe out our family line forever, and leave this town echoing and empty.

I cannot fight him. I have no knife, and how can I forge one in the midst of all this blood and mayhem? I curse his name – a curse I hope will haunt him in his next life – but there is little else I can do. 

I run into the wilderness, live off the land, and survive. I hope some of the women are doing so as well. I try to find milkweed to fashion a rope to make a bow, but those who have come before me have already harvested it all from the countryside nearby. 

After a time, I return to the town. I learn that an old woman killed the murderer at last, dying herself in the process. There are survivors here. But we are all men. I am the youngest, and thus it is my turn to die alone.

I bury everyone. I try to leave the place clean and tidy. And when my time comes, I stand in the graveyard to die.

**

I am born alone in the wilderness, from nothing.

I scout for a good place. I find vast plains of freezing snow and burning desert, rocks and snakes and emptiness. I find water too far from food, and food too far from water. I abandon babies I cannot keep. I run and run and run, until I know that even if I find a place now, I am to old to do anything with it.

Standing in a barren field, I allow myself to die.

**

I am born to a mother who exclaims in delight, who tells me I am the only girl in the village, that I am their only hope. That I must live.

I do. I have children, many of them. Some of them live to old age. Many have children of their own.

In the afterlife, eleven more generations follow, and I am proud of every one of them.

**

I am born in a famine. My mother takes me away from the town and tries to keep me alive on wild berries, but she fails before I am old enough to thank her properly for the attempt.

**

I am born to a mother who is already dying of a snake bite. She apologizes to me as her body crumples to the ground.

**

I am born to a mother who has nothing yet but a piece of string and a stick to mark her home. Together we build a farm: not large, but enough to keep going. A good start for future generations. My great-great-grandchildren are the last to see it.

**

I am born in the middle of a wasteland, to a mother who does not stop running long enough to look at me. I offer myself as a meal to a wolf, but before the creature's bite can kill me, I starve.

** 

I am born, from nothing, in an old, decaying town. My children and I repopulate it, rebuild it, make it thrive again. It is not my dream of building a lasting legacy from the wilderness, but it is a legacy, nonetheless, and I am pleased.

**

I am born as my own many-times-great-grandson. The city I knew has changed, but I would recognize it, I am certain, even after a hundred generations. 

I try to tell people who I was, what I did. I replanted that farm, I tell them. I dug that well, I made that axe. Very few of them seem to care. But all of them are alive because of me, and the thought gives me a sense of pride.

**

I am born to a mother who is already gone when I first open my eyes.

**

I am born to a mother wearing a crown, and hailed at my birth as a princess. The crown goes to my older sister when my mother dies, and I spend my life baking pies to feed her subjects. My descendants live for fifteen generations, and hers for three.

** 

I am born and abandoned, and taken in by a stranger and loved. When age claims me at last, I am mourned the deepest by those I am not related to by blood.

**

I am born only to die.

**

I am born only to live.

**

I am born...

**

I am born...

** 

I am born...

** 

I am born.


End file.
